by Anais Nin
***
Rank wrote me a letter from Philadelphia where he spends most of his time.
You are great in life as I am in creation. You lived my creations. And in that sense you are greater, and your philosophy of living is true. It is the one I arrived at—on paper! And because you are rare in living, your writing is not only rare, a unique document, but it is great. If no one else does I will publish House of Incest.
The more I explore neurosis the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and if it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one's endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction.
Many of the romantics destroyed themselves because they could not attain the absolute, in love or creation. They could not attain it because it was invented. It was a myth. The neurotic acts in the same way. He sets himself impossible goals, imaginary goals. He will win the respect and admiration of a parent who is not even alive any more (appealing to his substitutes). He will gain the love of the world by giving the world something it may not want. He will seek union with opposites, perverse contrary relationships with those who turn away. He will seek to conquer the unconquerable. Like the romantic, he is creative, and may apply his power of invention to art, science, history.
Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimize‹ and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering. As I expose an imaginative, subjective interpretation, their world changes according to their concept of it, their own vision.
Rank, in life, can be dark and heavy. He has no joie de vivre. His pleasures are of the mind.
He admits that in creation the doctor or the artist can achieve the absolute, but not in life. In life one has to accept limitations. In creation there is autocracy. In life, compromises. The more yielding, the more easily contented. Henry yields, accepts. Rank seeks to change, control. Henry is happier. Wisdom gained from ideas, the effort to control life intellectually is disastrous. This is the will D. H. Lawrence railed against.
Limitations of life. Doors closing as one walks forward. Curtains of silence. Inertia. Obstacles like walls. Then to discover that the limitation is within oneself. A malformation, wanting the impossible. In all of them the imagination is the trap. Evasion is possible by renunciation of life and creation in art. Or by accepting limitations. I was walking along Broadway thinking: in my books I can ordain, rule, walk, laugh, shout, accuse, act in any way I please. I am creator and king. The same will applied to life may destroy me. Many creators, romantics, neurotics, are tragic figures in life. They are absolutists. They tire of struggling against the limitations of life. In art there are none.
Joy only in the little things along the way. Henry never looks at his life as a whole, but accepts each day, not caring about past or future.
My patients suffer from loneliness. Their illness isolates them. But when they are cured they suffer a different loneliness, because there are more neurotics than ex-neurotics. And the ex-neurotics have a special insight and a special language.
No matter how well constructed, how impressive a rationalization is (a publisher explaining why he cannot publish a certain book, a woman explaining why she cannot marry a certain man, a scientist telling me why he had to abandon a certain discovery, a man in politics giving a reasonable explanation of his betrayal of a friend), I can see the real motivation behind it, the one they do not want to see. It is a terrifying knowledge, like carrying an X-ray machine about and seeing the bone structure.
I can see Rank differently now, the cause for his tragic personal life. If Henry has no will at all, Rank has too much.
The caricature aspect of life appears whenever the drunkenness of illusion wears off. Some Americans have lost the faculty for illusion, they are so pragmatically sober, that may be why they have to drink so much. They have not the power of levitation or escape of the poet or the artist who can make another world within this world.
Henry is finishing the rewriting of Black Spring. He wrote the marvelous "City Man" section, and the pages on burlesque.
I am restless and impatient in my analyst's chair.
Once more I reach the same conclusion. You cannot help others to live. They live on their own power for a while, and then soon start looking for another leader, support, crutch.
Henry's obsession that he is writing in a void, that he is like a rat caught in a trap, even while Tropic of Cancer is circulating and Black Spring not yet shown to a publisher.
I said to him: "What would you say then if your books had been burned like the books of D. H. Lawrence, or if you had really been persecuted and put in jail as De Sade was?"
He cannot bear rejections, the silence of conventional publishers, formal rejection slips from magazines, obtuse comments of people.
[April, 1935]
Eleven years ago I received a copy of Rahab by Waldo Frank. It was given to me by Hélène Boussinesq, his French translator. I loved the book and Hélène gave me a letter of introduction to him.
He took me out to dinner. He looked like a Spaniard, dark hair, not tall, dark eyes. He called me La Campanilla. He is alert but seems a little bitter. "I am more loved in South America than I am in my own country." He also talked about his theory that woman is given too high an importance in America because she was so rare in the early days, there were so few of them and men prized them. They retained their privileged position ever since.
When he assumed I would spend the night with him I was annoyed, because there had been no gradual courting, no effort made to sense how I felt, no subtle interplay. It was as plain and simple as ordering a dinner. I laughed. He said: "I can see you are not filled with me, not deeply interested in me."
We walked down Broadway, we watched a spectacle which fascinated me: Saturday night on Broadway, The word MAGIC winked from store windows hung with masks, tricks, jokes, fake cigars, false teeth at the bottom of a glass, false money, false eyelashes, boxes of magician's supplies. Prescriptions for delusions. Third eyes, paper snakes with darting tongues, distorting mirrors, mechanical divers who never tired of touching bottom and then ascending, who never stayed to explore the depths. Colored powders for increased potency, harem beauties of rubber offering rippling hips and breasts, dancing bears, dancing dervishes, books on magic, opium pipes, voodoo fetishes, directions for hexing an enemy, an eye rotating at the bottom of a glass as if your own eye had fallen into it as you drank, a marriage ring which could never be removed, a chain which could not be broken, a lock which could not be unlocked.
There was an auction going on in a jewelry store. The man who was performing wore no magician's clothes. He was dressed like a salesman. He invited you to gamble one dollar on a gold watch. He passed it around for everyone to see. He gathered a small crowd. He talked so swiftly it was a strain to follow his words. His eyes leaped from the watch to the crowd, and when he had the crowd's eyes following his he gave his attention to other objects, as if forgetting about the watch, starting to auction off a doll, a pocket knife. The watch was left on the counter. He diverted people's attention to statuettes, glass bowls, book ends. The crowd waiting and those who had given him a dollar kept their eyes on the watch. The crowd stood. Children were waiting at home, hungry husbands, tired wives, invalids. Time passed. Some grew impatient. The salesman had an interminable flow of words. "In a minute we will auction off the watch." They had given one dollar, they could not relinquish the game, the gamble, the expectancy, the suspense..."But first of all I want you to notice the statue of this burlesque queen, it is made of hard candy, it is eatable." He talked so fast it was impossible to interrupt him. Some people in the crowd had engagements, some had aching feet. I could see them standing first on one foot, and then on the other, or slipping off their shoes and rubbing their feet, and some looked exhausted, but they stayed, they felt en
gaged with fate. It was not a watch, it was their personal luck which was at stake. It was "Am I lucky, or am I not lucky?" Will a gift come I have not earned, not worked for, a miracle? I have thrown the dice, I cannot turn my back, the minute I turn my back I will be called and the gold watch will be given to another. The watch is there. It grows more golden. The salesman plays for time. He prolongs the moment of faith, of expectancy.
In the brilliant lights one is dazed. One forgets what one wanted. If one abandons the place, someone else steps into one's place. Trick boxes.
Waldo Frank could not understand why this spectacle fascinated me.
I tried to explain but could not do so successfully. "It is something about the truth you cannot bear to see so you look at other things. The truth about a relationship appears sometimes in the first words that are uttered, but one does not want to hear them. I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair. Illusions. Delusions. That salesman is selling illusion."
Waldo Frank laughed. He took me to the burlesque show on Fourteenth Street. Only men in the audience. We sat in a red plush box. The art of teasing, and not revealing. The woman who took off everything but kept her long white gloves on.
It is spring and my patients are doing well. But I cannot leave yet.
Rank believes that to create it is necessary to destroy. Woman cannot destroy. He believes that may be why she has rarely been a great artist. In order to create without destroying, I nearly destroyed myself.
Henry is painting water colors with Emil.
Rank made me finish House of Incest. He helped me to discover the meaning and then I was able to make a synthesis. It was he who said: "Why, it ends here, of course, with the dancer. And this page on drugs [when I say to Sabina: "I'll write for you—that will be our drug"] can't be thrown out. It's important. It says just what I felt when I read the manuscript on the train. It is like a drug. I woke up when I got to the end as if I had been dreaming. If people accept your language, then they will be drugged."
I have had, during analysis, plenty of time to study the effect of artistic language as opposed to scientific language.
Henry finished Black Spring, and met William Carlos Williams.
Lunch with Rebecca West. We enjoyed talking about our first meeting in 1932. She had written to me about my book on D. H. Lawrence, praising it and inviting me to visit her. She had written a favorable review. I did go to London, with the manuscript of Tropic of Cancer. I liked her immediately, her warmth, her brilliant dark eyes, her wit. She visited me in Louveciennes. We talked so much together we lost our way in the forest and had to telephone to a friend to come and pick us up in a car. In Louveciennes she commented that she had never seen a house where deep talks could be treated so lightly. We made a trip together with her husband and mine, with much gaiety and affection.
She had not finished her book because of her operation. She thought she was not going to live. "I won't see the spring again!"
But she was here, in New York, lively, keen, and I reminded her of the wonderful scene in Louveciennes when after reading Winter of Artifice, she had tears in her eyes and she said: "Wasn't our father a terrible man!"
She introduces me to Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Massey as the "woman who wrote the best book on D. H. Lawrence." We all went to an ice-hockey game. Madison Square Garden. Violence, speed, physical power, strong lights, strong smells, loud music, hoarse voices shouting, broken noses, intensity. Drinks at Reuben's while Eddie Cantor gives a stag party and Director Max Reinhardt shares his supper with two actresses and a stage designer. John Huston joins us, and talks to me intently. Mrs. Bel Geddes has mocking eyes. Then to Harlem, first to a nightclub, to hear some singing, and then to a private apartment. Everyone was dancing and drinking. Half white people, half black, beautiful women, well-dressed men, and jazz, it was intoxicating and magnificent, the laughter, the dancing, but I miss the intimacy which grows out of such parties in Paris. Here it is all jokes, banter, evasion. Norman Bel Geddes tells me I look like the women in Persian miniatures, but ten minutes later he no longer recognizes anyone, forgets who he came with. John Huston is rough and vital, cynical, colorful. Raymond Massey is elusive, mysterious, with his slow speech and heavy glance from heavy-lidded eyes.
More drinks. More talks later, at some private club. When cynicism reaches its height I begin to withdraw. When people begin to mock and destroy each other, I feel closer to my troubled patients. I feel closer to people who are suffering than to those who joke, mock, hate.
Frivolous evenings always start very well. I enter the game with vivacity and elation, with curiosity and love of adventure. But gradually my pleasure and exhilaration wane. Irony, mockery, ridicule freeze my blood. As if I witnessed a scene of sadism.
I look for the exit, an excuse to escape. My malaise grows. My throat contracts and I can neither enjoy eating nor drinking. I want to leave. If everybody is drunk and venomous, the need to leave becomes imperative. I give inadequate excuses. Every minute I stay becomes a torment. I come home, angry at myself. I cut off the evening. I am not sure why. Good-bye, good-bye.
I went to visit Waldo Frank. I noticed how bright and clairvoyant his eyes were. He was gentle and human, mellow, and he talked about writing with sensitivity. He received me with such a look of faith and wonder that it made him seem very young. Here I could talk freely. There was a core to him, something rich and true, insight too. He read to me out of Virgin Spain, his description of a Catalonian woman. We drank port. His room was simple, orderly. He said: "You are one who knows neither death nor finished things. Your discontent is creative restlessness, and not a grouch, it is curiosity. You still expect miracles."
He gave me a feeling of youth, of wholeness, sweetness. He told me he did not admit everyone into the seclusion he needs for his work. He is a warm, human man who did not harden, or die, as so many American writers harden and die.
He is a poet riveted to reality as poets in America are, but a poet full of talk of God and simplicity. "God sent you, La Campanilla, so that I might finish my book."
He did not want to go out. He wanted that peaceful, protected feeling in which he finds strength.
Mr. Wagner was waiting for me in the lobby, just back from hunting quail in Georgia; his photograph appeared in the Sunday paper. He was leaping over a fence on a famous horse. With him I walked gaily to the Plaza bar.
He pretended to be crystal-gazing into the water bottle and said: "I see no hope of a love affair in the future."
What a face he would make if I said to him: I am afraid of becoming a saint. This is what working at analysis has done to me. living so much for others gives me a fear of becoming a saint, of being lured back into the whitest corner of the dream, nun's wings like small ship's sails. My love for my patients, for that moment of absolute sincerity which takes place, makes me want to stay in the world.
I love the world so much, it moves me deeply, even the ordinary world, the daily world, even the bar table, the tinkling ice in the glasses, the waiter, the dog tied in the coat room.
Mr. Wagner has not said I am a saint. Nobody has said it. The watching of the miracle of man being born over and over again, this makes me fear to wake up too far away from the earth.
All day people coming, people asking for strength.
I can see that analysis could create a new kind of dangerous idealism. At times I feel Rank puts too great an emphasis on what ought to be rather than what is; he never accepts experience as a substitute for wisdom. At times I feel the process of accelerated wisdom may become a dangerous short-cut. It eliminates terror and pain. I feel it should only be used in extreme cases, when the neurotic is paralyzed, cannot live, cannot love, cannot work. At times Rank portrays an idyllic state, an expectation of life without pain. Rank is saying that man was born to be happy, that pain is illness.
/> Levels and levels. It is as if I were in an elevator, shooting up and down, hundreds of floors, hundreds of lives. Up to heaven, terraces and planetariums, gardens, fountains, clouds, the sun. The wind whistles down the shafts. On the next to the last floor, dance halls and restaurants, and music. In the rooms, bars of shadows on the walls from the casement windows. A bower. A confessional. A couch to lie on. Something to lie on, to rest on, to cling to. Faith. Red lights! Down! Down! The telephone operator announces: a man who limps, a man whose hand is paralyzed, a man in love with his mother, a man who cannot write the book he wants to write, a woman deserted, a woman blocked by guilt, a woman crying with shame for her love of another woman, a girl trembling with fear of man. Free the slaves of incubi, of ghosts and anguish. Listen to their crying. A tough political partisan says: "I feel soft and iridescent." Another one says: "It is a weakness to listen to the complaints of the child in us." I say: "It will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man—the sense of wonder." The telephone announces: "A cable for you, shall I send it up?" "Yes, yes." "Happy birthday, happy birthday, love." Red lights! Downl White lights! Going up! Playing at being God, but a god not tired of listening, all the while wondering how the other god can watch people suffer. Music, the solace. Through music we rise in swift noiseless elevators to the heavens, breaking through the roof. Red lights! Down! At the drug store I buy stamps, mail letters, ask for a coffee. Physically I am cracking. It is not the change of floors, the sudden rise and descents which make me dizzy, but the giving. Parts of my life, parts of my energy are passing into others. I feel what they feel. I identify with them. Their anguish tightens my throat. My tongue feels heavy. I wonder whether I can go on. I have no objectivity, no indifference. I pass into them to illumine, to reveal, but I cannot remain apart from them, be indifferent to their bad nights, or their hopes, or their cries, or even their happiness. I look out of my window as Rank looked out of his window. People are skating in the Park. The band is playing. It is Sunday. I could be walking through the streets of Paris, joyous, lively streets where people are in love with life and even with their tragedies. I could be walking along the human and beautiful Seine. I did not recognize my happiness then. I yearned for adventure. The children's laughter rises to the twenty-fifth floor, to the window at which I stand. Red lights! Down! All the way down I am thinking of the problem of emotional symmetry. People's need of retaliation, revenge, need to balance anger against anger, humiliation against humiliation, indifference against indifference.
